14: Frampton / Vanagt / Gehr / Baron / De Clercq

5 April, 2015 - 17:30
SPHINX 3

 

 

SELECTION 2015

A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.

Lemon

Hollis Frampton
,
US
,
1969
,
16mm
,
colour
,
7'

As a voluptuous lemon is devoured by the same light that reveals it, its image passes from the spatial rhetoric of illusion into the spatial grammar of the graphic arts.” (Hollis Frampton)

Lemon examines the nature of vision, illusion, spatiality, and film. A minimalist movie, in which a single static shot of a lemon continually changes in appearance as the light on screen changes.

In Waking Hours

Sarah & Katrien Vanagt
,
BE
,
2015
,
HD
,
colour
,
18'

In 1632, Dr Plempius from Amsterdam conceived an experiment into vision. One sets up a freshly deceased cow’s eye in a darkened room and the painting that emerges perfectly depicts all the objects in the outside world. Sarah Vanagt films her niece, historian Katrien Vanagt, meticulously following the master’s instructions.

History

Ernie Gehr
,
US
,
1970
,
16mm
,
b&w
,
22'

I’d like to say more, but words fail me. This is historically reductive. That won’t do. One makes choices. Choices are made. The opacity has been tapped. The black quivers, the matter is set in motion. There is light. Its primeval, prehistoric. At last, the first film! It trembles in the eye-mind. Unique.” (Michael Snow)

In an interview with Jonas Mekas in 1971 Ernie Gehr explained how, to make History, he had held black fabric in front of a movie camera without a lens (“its image-forming device”), using a light to illuminate the cloth. Mekas didn’t ask why there was no lens, because he grasped the implications of Gehr’s granular vision. “History comes closest,” Mekas said, “to being nothing but the reality of the film materials and tools themselves.” (Manohla Dargis)

Detour de Force

Rebecca Baron
,
US
,
2014
,
HD
,
b&w
,
29'

Detour de Force is a fascinating portrait of “thoughtographer” Ted Serios, a hard-drinking Chicago bellhop who caused a sensation in the sixties with his psychic ability to produce hundreds of Polaroid images from his mind. Constructed from 16mm archival footage gloriously restored by the Austrian Film Museum, the film is less interested in the authenticity of Serios’s claims than in the mediatization surrounding the man and his manipulation of various forms of technology, clearly playing to the camera as he seemingly defies the limits of analogue film.

Black

Anouk De Clercq
,
BE
,
2015
,
35mm
,
b&w
,
5'

Black refers to black as the core component of the visual and is an ode to darkness. When the lights go out, the auditorium and the screen become one in a boundless space. The screen, the auditorium and the audience share a sudden invisibility. An experience at once personal and collective.